Patrick McKenzie

There's this thing we often say in the tech industry called bike shedding, which is if you're building a nuclear power plant,

And many people cannot sensibly comment on, like, what is the flow rate through the pipes to cool a nuclear reactor?

But if you build a bike shed next to the nuclear power plant, it's very easy to have opinions on the color of the bike shed.

And so in the meetings about the nuclear power plant, you will have...

a truly stupid amount of human effort devoted into what colors you should paint the bike shed.

So it is very difficult for most people in civil society to successfully inject a vaccine into someone's arms, to successfully manage a logistics network, to successfully build a nationwide information gathering system to centralize this information and pass it out to everyone.

And we aggressively trained the entire American professional managerial class starting at seventh grade or earlier in decrying systemic racism, which to be clear is a problem.

And so any discussion about what should we do with regards to information distribution, which goes out to a broad audience in the American professional managerial class, who essentially call all the shots in the US system, will almost invariably get bent to, I have no particular opinions on server architecture here and nothing useful to comment, but what's our equity strategy?

And the equity strategy dominated discussions of the,

the correct way to run the rollout to the exclusion of operationalizing it via medical necessity.

People brag about that fact.

That fact is enormously frustrating to me.

And if you say it with exactly those words and emotional valence, people will say, no, no, that's not exactly what we meant.

But when they're talking to other audiences, they'll say, no, this is absolutely what we mean.

This is one of those few times where we were genuinely up against a scarcity constraint that like, you know, physical reality was there were a scarce number of vials and we needed to have a prioritization system.

And some people who urgently needed the vials were not going to get them first.

Everyone was going to get them eventually.

But the mad rush in our political system to dole out favors around the prioritization for those first vials.

exceeded the actual distribution and successful injection of the vials as a goal.

Again, California reported to the federal government that it was only successfully injecting 25% of its allocation.